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The highlight of this weekend's Grand Prix of Motorsport is the American Le Mans series race, featuring many of the cars that competed in the French 24 Hours of Le Mans, including the winning Audi R10 (above). (DAVID VINCENT/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The crowds. In mid-June, they come not by the thousands, not by the tens of thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands. The sheer numbers are breathtaking.
They are race fans and oglers, partiers and politicians trolling for votes. The hawkers, loud and desperate to sell you something, anything — a T-shirt, a toy car, a croissant, a beer, a bratwurst — are not just there, but everywhere. Less noisy are the drivers new and old, skilled and successful, the hopeful, the fearful and the aspiring.
One of them is Hans-Joachim Stuck, who is holding court in an Audi hospitality suite. He is a big, smiling Bavarian nicknamed Strietzel, after a sweet pastry, and he is popular with everyone. It's odd to see him at an Audi venue: Stuck won Le Mans twice in the mid-1980s driving Porsches. But here he is chatting away on a sunny morning just minutes before the 24 Hours of Le Mans begins.
A few metres away is Audi driver Allan McNish of Scotland. He's in his full racing suit as he wolfs down a huge plate of pasta, chatting with three British reporters.
In an hour, McNish will climb into Audi's No. 2 car to begin 24 hours of racing, from the middle of Saturday afternoon to the middle of Sunday. It's a gruelling test of man and machine and the small redheaded driver needs to load up on carbs.
McNish isn't talking to me — his lunchtime interview was arranged months ago and is exclusively for the Brits — but Stuck is, and he marvels at the speeds of today's cars and the technology in them and the fitness of the drivers.
Stuck knows Le Mans as a racer, though it has been a decade since he last competed here. Though retired from high-level racing, the 57-year-old knows exactly what he's talking about here and he is worried about the Audis, which are older cars than the new Peugeots, one of which is being driven by Canadian Jacques Villeneuve. (Villeneuve is trying to complete something of a triple racing crown, having previously won the Indy 500 in the same year as a CART championship, followed by the F1 world championship.)
Stuck knows almost everything there is to know about going fast side-by-side against other racers. His legendary father, Hans, also a splendid driver, taught him to drive race cars on the Nurburgring track in Germany. The younger Stuck tasted his first victory there as a 19-year-old in his initial 24-hour race. He has raced here, in Formula One, in touring cars and all the rest.
After he's done with me, Stuck graciously mingles and laughs with others in the suite. They are for the most part sponsors and other special types — celebrities, suppliers, senior management, prominent media people — given a valuable pass into this reserved space (a temporary building, really an open-air, two-storey tent erected behind security-patrolled barricades).
A racing spectacle
This is just one of the many mental snapshots I took away from Europe's greatest motor racing spectacle. Every year in June, 350,000 racing fanatics and spectacle junkies pack into this otherwise sleepy town, 90 minutes southwest of Paris by high-speed train. Le Mans is a tournament of drivers and their corporate-backed teams who tear about for 24 hours through sunshine, darkness and rain.
Some call Le Mans the Grand Prix of Endurance. The race starts on the track, but winds through closed public roads designed to test the mettle of the cars and the drivers though all conditions. For 24 straight hours.
The shocking thing for a Canadian here for the first time is how crazed the French are about all this. And the Germans, the Danes, the Swedes, the Dutch, the English, the Scottish, the Italians, the Austrians …
In Canada, Le Mans is the premier car race that almost no one pays any attention to. Here in person, however, it is clearly one of the world's great spectacles. The Americans have the Indy 500, but Europe has Le Mans.
It is an event, a happening, a celebration and you don't even need to like cars to be left dizzy from drinking in such an awesome spectacle. (Of course, there is plenty of drinking, too. But that's another story.)
Brand building
The biggest teams like Audi and Peugeot pour millions and millions into Le Mans, fielding factory teams of up to three cars and telling the world about it. This is called brand building.
Audi, Peugeot, Aston Martin and others spend huge sums hosting parties for invited guests who are given special-access passes worth hundreds of euros — if you could buy them.
Audi, which has made Le Mans its own for a decade now, has won the race five straight times and for the last half-decade has used it to showcase quattro all-wheel drive (AWD), direct fuel injection, and diesel engine technology.
The racing effort seems small compared to the resources used for getting out the message about Audi's technical expertise.
Case in point: Each year Audi erects its own makeshift dormitory right beside the track. Called generously, or ironically, the Audi Hotel, it is two warehouses converted into hundreds of single-bed dorm rooms.
A five-minute walk from the sight of race cars roaring down straights at 300-plus km/h, the Audi Hotel offers rest from the bustle of the race. A room here, smaller than your typical prison cell, cannot be bought but is worth a small fortune.
And this year Audi raised a giant hospitality tent smack in the middle of the paddock area where the race cars were prepped. Food and drink flowed non-stop, handed out by white-coated serving staff. This is where Stuck held court.
Then there was Audi's air-conditioned private box in the stands, with a large dining room tucked away behind glass-enclosed stadium seating. This box was perched just above the main straightaway where the race began and ended, and right across from two more open-air Audi boxes, directly overlooking the Audi pits trackside. For those who wanted to smell and hear the action track-side, to see the drivers of these three-man teams jump in and out of the cars, this was the place.
But most impressive of all: a monstrous two-storey enclosed tent with two gourmet buffet lines, two well-stocked bars, linen-covered tables, luxurious leather couches and video driving pods. Up on the second floor, on race day, Audi broadcast its own live, closed-circuit television show.
At midnight, a third of the way into the race, bands took to the stage to keep the partiers awake. Meanwhile, the race roared on just metres away, outside the glass doors and within breathing distance of the track-side patio decks erected just for this race. Here you could actually watch the race.
Hard to resist
I was there to cross one more thing off my bucket list. In 20-odd years of doing this, I've had my ears bled at the Daytona 500, I've swooped into Monaco by helicopter to watch the Grand Prix, I've heard Gomer Pyle — uh, Jim Nabors — sing Back Home Again in Indiana at the Indy 500. But until this year I'd not lived Le Mans.
My chance to come here came right on the heels of the Montreal Grand Prix, the only F1 race left in North America. Back-to-back racing spectacles. I could not, would not, resist.
Apparently many auto makers can't resist racing, either. Manufacturers from Ingolstadt (home of Audi in Germany) to Detroit to Tokyo and all points in between collectively spend billions each year, racing and promoting and marketing racing.
As I wandered through Le Mans and down Montreal's Saint Catherine Street during F1 weekend just days earlier, I kept wondering how these auto makers determine if this is money well spent — if their involvement in motorsports drives sales and profits.
"It's all about selling cars and trucks, and how you can use this property or category to generate more revenue," said one auto executive who asked not to be named, perhaps because of his sheer honesty.
I did hear, over and over again, that if a manufacturer goes racing it must be to win and create buzz and get the buying public to care about the effort. What's missing, however, is proof that auto makers get a direct return on their investment — proof that racing sells cars.
The marketing types and their agencies and the racing teams themselves, the ones chasing sponsorship dollars, all say that from a marketing perspective racing can help sell new cars and, if done well, enhances a company's image.
Audi, for example, uses Le Mans to showcase its diesel engines, the ones that win 24-hour races, and the benefits of quattro AWD technology.
While Le Mans wins attention for Audi — and company insiders insist that consumers are more aware of Audi thanks to all the Le Mans wins — it is impossible to know if Audi actually sells more cars because it puts on this massive racing effort each summer in France. But I am willing to bet that almost no one walks into a Canadian Audi dealer saying, "I'm here to buy an Audi because of that latest Le Mans victory."
On the other hand, racing can be a detriment.
Ford, when it still owned Jaguar, squandered hundreds of millions on an F1 race team that never got results. The money would have been better spent developing new Jaguar models.
Another example: A recent Wall Street Journal article described how NASCAR driver Kyle Busch climbed out of his No. 18 Toyota after a come-from-behind victory, only to be greeted by a chorus of boos. "There are a lot of fans who don't necessarily like Toyota," Busch told the paper.
Toyota turned to NASCAR hoping to win over millions of Americans who passionately follow the circuit. Instead, Toyota's success on the track helped draw attention to the failures of the Detroit Three auto makers, which are losing market share, closing factories and laying off workers as imports from Asia and Europe, led by Toyota, enjoy record profits and sales.
Toyota's successes, both on the race track and in the showroom, stand in stark contrast to the weak performance of the unprofitable Detroit companies. General Motors has just said it will pull back from NASCAR as part of a larger $10-billion cost-cutting initiative.
In this context, Toyota's high profile in NASCAR might even be fuelling resentment.
Research commissioned by NASCAR last September found that only half of its fans think Toyota is good for the sport, and 6 per cent believe Toyota hurts it.
Definitely expensive
Whether racing helps or hurts — whether winning on Sunday sells cars on Monday — there is no question it's expensive.
BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Ferrari and Toyota collectively spend billions of dollars every year to compete in F1. Formula One is generally considered the world's most technically sophisticated form of racing. Competing in F1 suggests technical competence and winning creates an aura of excellence.
But failing to win presents its own problems. Toyota, for example, has spent years in F1 and has yet to win a race, though it has had podium finishes. Honda, despite a massive effort, not to mention an unmistakably huge presence in Montreal, is rebuilding its current team after nearly a decade of mediocre results that, if anything, sullies Honda's formidable reputation as an engine company. A lack of success surely hurts the brand, just as winning apparently helps.
The key factor is that the results are there for all to see — instantly. While TV and other news media coverage spreads various brand messages world-wide, nothing is gained if the message screams "failure."
The marketing people at big auto makers, of course, do not have any control over on-track successes and failures. So they focus on events and activities built around racing.
In Montreal, for example, Honda turned a full block of Crescent Street into a pedestrian mall filled with booths, displays, and entertainment geared toward the youth market. As in past years, Honda Canada also used this year's Grand Prix as a dealer perk to reward the winners of various sales contests.
At Le Mans, Audi for years has used Le Mans racing as a proving ground and public launch pad for the FSI (gasoline direct injection) system subsequently introduced in its production cars.
Le Mans also proves, at least to the Audi way of thinking, that diesel-engine technology is sophisticated, high-tech and a pure winner. Early next year, Audi will launch its first diesels in North America and the Le Mans wins will play a role in introducing diesels to Canadian and American buyers.
Meanwhile, the results of this year's 24-hour race will surely be used to help validate Audi's quattro system.
For the first half of the race, Peugeot's newer diesel cars were clearly faster than the Audis, but in the middle of the night, rain began to fall. The No. 2 Audi car, trailing the No. 7 Peugeot by more than two minutes, clawed its way to the lead thanks to better grip from the quattro system. The rear-drive Peugeots were slipping and sliding in the wet and simply could not compete.
Desperate to beat Audi, Peugeot put its No. 7 race car on slicks in the final hour even as rain poured over parts of the long circuit.
The French team, trailing the No. 2 Audi R10 TDi by three minutes, was hoping to make up time on the dry sections of the circuit. But it was not to happen for Peugeot.
Tom Kristensen, who shared the driving with Allan McNish and Dindo Capello in the No. 2 Audi, was able to keep the hammer down, in large measure because he had grip going to all four wheels.
The race ended with Kristensen claiming a record-setting eighth win at Le Mans. The Peugeots finished second and third, completing an all-diesel podium.
"To have a car that you can start and drive for 24 hours is, I think, unique," Kristensen said after the race. "Okay, if the race had been dry we probably wouldn't have won. You never know. But the best car always wins and this is what we can be proud to say."
More breathtaking still, the stands were full, the crowds alive with energy, even after 24 hours of racing, much of it in the rain.
Correction: The Audi R10 race car does not have quattro all-wheel-drive. The team attributes the car's win in the rain at the 24 Hours of Le Mans to the car's setup, which it called a better balance for wet and dry conditions than that of opponents. Incorrect information appeared Aug. 28.
